


The Force’s Wife

by K_Popsicle



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character death is pre-story but tagged anyway, Introspection, Other, Post-Star Wars: A New Hope, Reincarnation, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:06:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23519683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_Popsicle/pseuds/K_Popsicle
Summary: Shmi wakes up on Tatooine because the Force wills it.
Relationships: The Force/Shmi Skywalker
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40
Collections: Party in the GFFA: Star Wars Flash Exchange 2020





	The Force’s Wife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jen425](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jen425/gifts).



> Alternate Title: The Force is a living thing that binds, us impregnates, us and sometimes brings us back from the dead.

Luke is fascinated by the headstones on the farm. They’re weathered from the fierce storms that sweep the planet, smooth edged and wearing away. One day there will be nothing left of them.

He’s most fascinated by the third from the left and finds himself resting against the headstone and watching the vast empty desert. There’s comfort there, warmth. The feeling never judges, never scolds, it loves in a pure way he can’t explain. One time his uncle catches him there and tells him that if he has time to stare at the dead then he doesn’t have enough chores. He is careful never to be caught again, but he always returns until he is much older and setting right great wrongs that have been committed across the galaxy by his own blood.

Shmi wakes as if from a rest. The air is damp and cool and she is in the open.

She opens her eyes to the bright sky above her and remembers dying. And she remembers all that preceded it. And she breathes.

Tears leak from the corners of her eyes. And she is blanketed by comfort.

This she knows. She’s felt its touch on her skin before. Felt the shifting sands of the universe as it settled on her, in her, and she relaxes and breathes again.

The damp night air, the warmth of a lover’s touch, and life renewed restore her and sooth the ills she has suffered. She does not ask it why she suffered, she does not ask it if she will suffer again, because she knows like a voiceless whisper in her ear that it was necessary. It whispers so much else while she lies there. No-one interrupts them as it tells her of plans beyond the scope of a mortal’s imagination.

“Will he be okay?” She asks as she remembers the boy who would visit. The boy who was the child of her own child. Hopeful, earnest, strong, and she loved him as she had loved her own son. Unquestioning, unjudging, absolutely.

The Force soothes and shows her so many possibilities that she is not sure which it will be or has been, or if the Force even knows. But her grandson is always there, far into the Distant Maybe and her granddaughter too by his side or apart. Shmi sees further and further still until it is day and night, and day and night again and still there is so much to see.

When her stomach rumbles with hunger and her lips become cracked and dry, she rises from the sand above her grave and enters her once homestead. It is abandoned now. Sand has gathered against the doors, blanketed the homestead, and when she struggles to climb through a doorway the Force steadies her with gentle ghostly touches and assurance.

The kitchen is still full but she knows it has been some time since anyone entered it. There is food in the larder, still cooled by the solar cells, that has survived, and she eats what can be saved and drinks the stale water. Her stomach grumbles but she ignores it. She has been a slave since she was old enough to hold a broom; a meal that doesn’t agree with her is better than no food at all.

When she is finished she does not know what more to do, and so she cleans, shovelling sand out from the rooms it has crept into. The work is hard. It eases her muscles and makes her feel alive, and if she stumbles she is steadied, and if she drops something it stops and floats back to where it belongs. These things are new. The Force has been there all along, not in her but around her. From the day she hid in the cairn near Mos Elrey to evade the raiders and she’d felt it touch the dampness on her cheek, the blood leaking from her lip, it has always been there. Then later, days, weeks, years, when it had touched her in ways that left her breathless and sanctified.

She waits until her bones feel tired, her muscles ache, and she lays on the bed she’d shared with a husband who had asked for nothing from her but her company. The suns are breaking the horizon together but, in her room, only a crack of the desert bright light filters in.

The Force settles around her, comforting, loving, and she closes her eyes tight and asks, “Was he okay, our boy?”

If it were man, or less than it is, it would hesitate. But the Force is energy and life and death and it shows her everything she asks. Shows her Anakin’s choices, his mistakes, his triumphs, moments of mercy, moments of love, moments of blind raging anger, and she cries for him and the love she still has for him. Cries for not having been able to hold him and tell him it was okay, that she forgave him, that she loved him.

This is why the Force chose her.

Then the Force shows her his death, shows her the greatest moment of her precious son’s life. The ultimate choice, the right choice, and she’s proud, so proud it hurts and squeezes her tight, that he made it. That his own son had the faith he could never have. She thanks the child who used to visit her again. For giving even the most lost of them all hope, for giving her son back to the light. And she sleeps with that hope in her heart and the Force comfortingly wrapped around her.

In the morning Shmi wakes. The house is clean, her son is dead, she is alive, and her grandchildren have an infinite universe of possibilities before them.

“What next, then?” She asks her constant companion, and it shows her a path, a purpose entwined with its own. And she agrees as she had in that cairn when it had loved her the first time, because she loves it too. Through life, death, and forever.


End file.
